District Wide Boundary Committee Meeting

By Gary Scott on July 13, 2017 at 3:22pm

Last night,Jacksonville School District 117 Committee on the District Wide Boundary Process had a committee of the whole meeting at Jacksonville High School.

At the last meeting, the committee looked at a “layered” approach for South Elementary, last night the committee looked at a “block” approach. The layered approach took mostly students from Eisenhower, whereas the “block” approach was a plan to take students mostly from the former Franklin area.

District 117 Superintendent Steve Ptacek tells us about what was discussed at the committee meeting:

“Well I hadn’t run the full number on the block scenario, but today before the meeting I did a practice run and found out that going North of Morton into the Franklin area that the student density population was just so much that we couldn’t go into without overcrowding Sout. So, I showed that and we decided that going up above Morton just wasn’t feasible.”

He says that the current model is a bit of a hybrid of both processes:
“It’s a little bit of a hybrid, we stayed just with South’s current boundary on the West side and just grabbed Rolling Acres and Prairie Noll into South and that balanced out the students that were leaving south and going to Murrayville-Woodson.”

The numbers, as they look currently, would displace students in less than 10 percent of the households in the district.

Board President Noel Beard also tells us that public feedback is welcome: The boundaries we are currently working with is how the board is trying to fill the schools to the way that board sees fit. So that what we’re working with trying to fill. If anyone in the public has any comments on how we can redraw to fill those in a different manner, we welcome those comments. But, we can’t just move students out without moving other students in to fill in those vacancies.

The committee will also meet once again on Wednesday July 19th.

The Jacksonville School District 117 Board will have their next regular meeting will be in August.